Bell Weather

by Dennis Mahoney

  “You can’t.”

  “I could.”

  “I’m here,” she said—a yes, a no, a compromise.

  He backed her through the room, toward the bed against the wall: a little four-poster, uncurtained for the summer, making it appear both cozy and exposed. She leaned against the footboard, trying not to fall, but the board rose only to the bottoms of her thighs and Molly tilted till she reached out and caught him round the hips. He said, “I’ve found what you’re afraid of.”

  “I’m not afraid of Nicholas.”

  “That isn’t what I meant.”

  He held her breasts through her stays. She liked the way they flattened and expanded in his palms.

  “I don’t know what to do.”

  “Play along,” John said.

  He took his waistcoat and shirt off. Molly touched his chest. She couldn’t feel his heart but she imagined it, enormous. He had mossy black hair around his wide, dark nipples and she wished it weren’t there; she couldn’t say why. He was skinnier and smoother than he’d seemed fully dressed, which made her think of sticks with the bark peeled away.

  “I’ll take my clothes off,” she said, proud to get it right, embarrassed to be talking but incapable of stopping. She hopped to get her shoes off, blinded by her hair, and struggled with her stomacher, pricking her fingertip and saying, “Oh, these stupid pins.”

  He turned her at the bed and unlaced her stays. They had such a clumsy time of diligently undressing her, she didn’t feel naked till she turned back around, wearing nothing but her stockings, and hugged him both to cover up and give herself away. She rubbed her face around his collarbone, mashing up her nose. She nudged him back and tugged his breeches down, and with it his erection, causing it to pop back up when it was free. Molly laughed. He sucked her breasts, first one and then the other.

  “Hmm,” she said, gazing at the heat-blurred room.

  A cloud of sunny motes swirled around her head. She arched back and tried to keep stable on the mattress but her hands kept sinking and her feet began to slip. The awkwardness distracted her. She worried he would notice but was irritated, too, because he wouldn’t help support her.

  “Wait,” Molly said.

  She righted herself and sat. Her bareness on the counterpane delighted her anew, reminding her of dressing in her room when she was little, when her nakedness was simple—something glorious and fun. She rolled her stockings off, dropped them on the floor, and raised her eyes. John’s erection stood before her, inches from her nose. She’d never examined one before—its veins, its lurid strangeness—and she leaned in close until her breath moved the hairs. His balls were light and solid when she held them in her hand.

  “One’s bigger than the other,” Molly said, full of wonder.

  She made a fist around his penis and began to move the skin. A tiny drop of fluid glistened at the tip. She thought of Mr. Fen’s clammy member in the hammock, but she didn’t let go when John kissed her mouth again, laid her on the bed, and knelt between her thighs.

  He drove his forearms down on either side of Molly’s ribcage, knuckles at her armpits, hovering above. She raised her knees and let her legs fall wider when he settled. He was heavy, also taller, with his stubble on her brow. His spine was slightly crooked when she hugged him round the back. He lowered his face and kissed her as he poked around below, aiming with his hips until he pushed himself in.

  It didn’t want to fit. Suddenly it did. She bit his lip and made him bleed, less from pain than from surprise. He tried to look impassive but the bite had clearly hurt. Her own pain was closer to a throb than a sting, feeling like a bruise that would tenderize later. The bed was too petite; she bumped the wall stretching back. When she moved her face forward so her chin was at his neck, their temples clunked together.

  “Sorry!” Molly said.

  He thrust and hit a spot, very deep, that made her pelvis ring. She saw her own foot flopping in the air and watched his backside contracting and expanding, hard at work. She tried to pay attention—was he enjoying this? was she?—but there was too much to follow, too many jolts and flashes. It was close but oddly distant. She surrendered, then revived.

  John finished quickly, spasming inside her with a bodywide clench. She was pleasantly relieved the experience was over and her inundated thoughts could finally get some air. He was leaden but alert. When his lungs swelled and emptied, Molly listened with a sigh. She rubbed his hair and saw his breeches still bunched around his ankles and he looked much younger than before, like a boy.

  Molly sneezed. It startled both of them and shook them into laughter, and he peeled himself off and lay beside her, hip to hip. She felt the spill between her legs and touched it with her fingers.

  “Don’t be frightened of the blood,” he said. “It’s natural at first.”

  “I know. My brother explained…” She heard herself and paused. “I didn’t have a mother or a governess to ask. Nicholas taught me things to warn me and prepare me.”

  “And your marriage?”

  “It’s a ruse. We’re hiding from our father.”

  She listened to his heart, reassuringly alive, and curled against him with the sunlight falling on her knees. The sun was overhead, straight above the roof, and must have been reflecting off something outside. Another window, Molly thought. What if somebody had seen?

  John didn’t speak. He expected her to talk. The ivy-patterned walls seemed denser as she stared, and his muscles felt tighter than an octopus knot. She could tell him just enough, embroidering the lie. Instead she told him everything, as true as she remembered, till at last his body softened and he stroked her sweaty hair.

  * * *

  He escorted her home an hour after dark but stopped to let her walk the last stretch alone. To face Nicholas together would exacerbate the risk. Molly pulled him into a shadow for a kiss before she lost him—his plans could not be changed, he left for Kinship tomorrow—and he promised he would think of some solution and return. Molly wasn’t sure. Having dallied with adultery, or something very like it in the weeks of his suspicions, he’d failed to act and finally let Molly take the lead. Had the reason been restraint, or had the jeopardy dissuaded him? And how did he view her now—as the artificial wife of a cunning young man whose fortunes, like his own, were bound to Kofi Baa? If their lies and misbehavior reached Kofi’s ears … Molly’s heart sank, imagining their patron’s disappointment. All his trust, all their prospects would shrivel in the flame.

  “Write,” Molly said.

  “I will,” John assured her.

  She drew him from the shadows but his face remained opaque. The nearest burning streetlamp was several doors away and even now, after making love twice and studying him for hours, she couldn’t read his body language, couldn’t guess his thoughts.

  A final kiss and then he left, preoccupied and grave.

  Molly found Nicholas waiting in the glum brown office. He sat behind the desk, trimming quills with a penknife, its silver looking fiery and keen beside a candle. His eyes had the same lively flicker as the blade.

  She closed the door and felt exposed, as she had been with John Summer, and discovered the exposure made her liberated, strong. Dressed or undressed, fettered or released, she was whole within herself again, completely Molly Bell.

  “You’ll tell me you’re in love and need your freedom,” Nicholas said. “Can you tell what I will answer?”

  His expression and his tone were pompously serene. There he sat, so certain he was privy to her secrets, and she hesitated, wondering how informed he truly was. His contacts and clients were dispersed throughout the city. Someone might have seen her, Mrs. Jacob Smith, entering the inn on the arm of John Summer and remaining there, cloistered in his room, until the dark.

  “I don’t care what you answer,” Molly said.

  “You do.”

  Nicholas pressed the penknife’s blade against his lips, the way a man in contemplation might gesture with a finger. Molly held his gaze but swayed in
her resolve. She used a table heaped with books as a low defensive wall, needing something more physical than insolence between them. Molly still viewed him as the brother of her memory, desperate in his privacy and quiet self-reliance. Yet he had aged beyond his years since arriving in the city. He was graying over the ears, hard to rile, hard to gauge, his authority as natural and tailored as a uniform.

  “You’re becoming like Father,” Molly said.

  His temple vein bulged. He lowered the knife as if his arm hadn’t strength enough to hold it. Then his eyes met the challenge and replied:

  I am better.

  Molly clutched her hair until it made her think of John, how his hands had combed the strands, catching in the knots.

  “I have far too many ties,” he said, “to sever all connections, but in time—another year, perhaps—a simpler situation may be carefully arranged.”

  “A year!” Molly said. “I cannot bear another day!”

  He paused and said, “I know,” speaking with a mournful twinge that seemed—she may have imagined it—to show a little more than disappointment. Was it fear? “You would risk all we have—”

  “Yes,” she interrupted.

  “—for your own selfish needs.”

  Her brother said it crisply and she bristled at the words. She stood behind the books and leaned against a stack of them. They formed a kind of stairway, threatening to fall.

  “I do as I am told and sit and die of boredom while you jaunt wherever you please, doing God knows what, and what is my reward? A window to the street! My brother as a husband! Is it selfish to be happy, selfish to be free? I’d have loved John Summer if he leeched me and abused me, long as I was anywhere but suffocating here. Don’t you see?” Molly asked. “I would sooner leave Grayport than scratch another letter. I would rather board a ship and sail back to Umber.”

  Nicholas twirled the penknife slowly in his fingers till he grasped it by the middle of the blade, as if to throw it.

  “Don’t be childish,” she said. “Am I supposed to be afraid?”

  She was poised when she said it but a feeling came upon her, one of distances expanding, like a long fall of night. Frances and her father, infinitely far. John Summer, less than one mile off, soon to leave. Even the little office opened like a gulf until it seemed they ought to shout to make themselves heard.

  Nicholas threw the knife with a deftly snapped wrist. Molly moved aside. It hit the beam between the window frames and wedged in the grain. Molly felt the air disappearing from her lungs. He had honed it—she could see the extra brightness of the edge.

  “You might have killed me,” Molly gasped.

  “I was certain you would move.”

  “Were you certain of your aim?”

  “More than anything,” he said.

  He walked around the desk and met her near the table, righting the stack of books she had tilted out of place. She picked up a volume—The Rudiments of Bruntish Grammar—and considered thumping his head, but when he reached toward the knife, Molly reached for it, too. Her hand covered his own. The blade remained stuck and they were posed, close together, like a married couple standing at the window of their home.

  Nicholas turned to face her. “What does John know?”

  “He knows I’m miserable and wish to get away,” Molly said, hoping that her words would distract him from the dodge.

  He had a way of going dead-eyed, lost in concentration, and of instantly reviving when it came time to speak. “I erred,” he said, “when we met Kofi Baa. I should have told him we were siblings.”

  “Wouldn’t he understand if we explained ourselves now?”

  “He might. He has a kindness in him, near to gullibility. If not for his success, I would think him too naïve. But Kofi himself is not the main concern. In the work from which I’ve shielded you—oftentimes to guard you—I have made certain enemies.”

  “Who?” Molly asked, letting go of the knife.

  Nicholas tugged it out. “People worse than Kofi. They would thrill to see me scandal-bound or suddenly exposed. I have also made allies who take me at my word. Think if such persons learned our parentage and past.”

  “We could still keep the secret of our father either way. Must we play at being married?”

  “One lie supports another.”

  “John is coming back,” she said.

  “When?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Let him go,” Nicholas told her. “I will give you greater leave. Don’t defy me just now—consider it, at least. You said it isn’t John but freedom you desire. This is a dangerous point for both of us, more than you can know. Hold fast awhile longer. It would shatter me to lose you.”

  Nicholas handed her the knife. She looked to where it had stuck and couldn’t find the mark. The cut was either shaded or miraculously healed. Molly shaved a fine wooden coil off the window frame.

  “What if it’s John himself instead of freedom I desire?”

  “We will see when he returns,” Nicholas replied.

  * * *

  She hadn’t bled in three months. More intuitively, she sensed it, and she didn’t need a doctor or a kick to make it real.

  Molly had written to John Summer once a week since he left. At first he’d written back. He missed her and was hoping to return with some solution, but he had met with complications, opportunities, delays. His letters came sporadically. She couldn’t use Nicholas’s couriers, so they kept their correspondence through the ordinary channels, which were slow and indirect and largely unreliable. The distant town of Kinship lacked a formal post office; Molly sent her letters to a tavern called the Hook where they sat, perhaps for days, until he went to pick them up.

  She had finally sent the news—she was pregnant, no mistake—and since he hadn’t written back in thirteen days, she had no way of knowing if her letter had arrived. Silence was the worst of all replies: a strangulation. She imagined telling Nicholas, or dying like her mother, or surviving with an infant. Would they move? Would they stay? She thought of how it had felt losing her virginity, squeezing him inside until the break made her bleed, and now a whole head and body were expected to emerge. She found herself attuned to every passing infant, admiring their delicacy and sizing up their skulls.

  Late at night, she’d lie in bed and smell the chill of early autumn as the crisp brown leaves blew against her window. She’d pray for John’s reply and gently rub her belly. Oh, to think of it! The eyes and ears growing in the dark, the miniature heart like a rare, perfect berry. She longed to hum a lullaby but Nicholas would hear, and so she tried to think of sunlight and laughter and relief, of the view atop the Cleaver and the bell of Beacon Mount, hoping her emotions were umbilically connected and the comfort she was summoning would nourish them together.

  One morning in mid-October, Molly woke to find ice-flowered windows in her room. The sun was cold and white. She had overslept the dawn and Nicholas hadn’t woken her, a thing so doubly strange she took it as an omen and hesitated to leave the safety of her blankets. The city’s early noise made the house too quiet. She wondered if her baby felt the same inside her womb, sensing all the world’s movement and desiring to join it, striving to be out regardless of the risk.

  She rose, tight with cold, and dressed in slippers and a robe. The fire wasn’t lit and she could almost see her breath. Halfway down the stairs, heat began to rise. She could tell there was someone in the parlor with her brother, and she paused in the darkness at the bottom near the door. They had heard her coming down and stopped their conversation. She considered going back and getting properly dressed but then it seemed as if her baby, with its own strong will, put her hand upon the knob and moved her into the parlor.

  Sun dispelled the gloom and there was Nicholas, strictly seated, with the wintry hard expression he had shown to Mr. Fen.

  John Summer stood to meet her in a fine green coat. He smiled and his buttons, warm gold, winked and shone. There was fire, there was warmth—there was John c
ome to save her. Molly’s baby seemed to gain a new buoyancy within her, and her feet left the floor when he crossed the room and hugged her.

  He put her down and held her waist, thumbs around her navel.

  Molly wiped her eyes and said, “I thought you’d gone forever.”

  “So did I,” Nicholas said.

  John’s hands felt wooden through the wrinkles of her shift. They faced Nicholas like a pair of young lovers with a parent.

  “Now that all four of us are present,” Nicholas said, “we should formulate a practical solution to our crisis. First and foremost, however, I will say congratulations.”

  The word’s warmth, so at odds with the coldness of his voice, left her brittle when he stood and offered her a hand. She took it automatically. He led her to a chair. John held her other hand and followed close behind her and the men seemed prepared to pull her limb from limb.

  The three of them sat together, equidistant in their chairs but angled so it seemed that Nicholas was separate. Between them stood a round mahogany table on a rug. Upon it were an oil lamp, paper, and an inkwell. The parlor was a compact, low-ceilinged square with the walls dark red above the ivory-painted wainscot. Countless conversations had occurred here in private. Molly sensed it in the hissing of the logs, like a whisper. It was Nicholas’s room, Nicholas’s air.

  She looked at John Summer, disbelieving he was real. He returned a look of kindness, and apology, and strength.

  He said, “I’ve told your brother everything.”

  He didn’t mean it literally but Molly felt disrobed. She hugged herself and lowered her head, trying not to flush. She felt as if Nicholas had witnessed her and John making love and could observe, as through a windowpane, the baby in her womb.

  “I mean to marry you and take you to Kinship,” John said. He quickly added, “If you’ll have me, poor and faulty as I am.”

  Molly didn’t see her brother roll his eyes, but sensing he had done so dampened the proposal.

  “It’s far enough to keep us free of scandal,” John continued.

  “What will happen,” Nicholas asked, “when someone who knows us travels north and finds you living with the lovely Mrs. Smith?”